Chorges…this must be the place; Andrei Greipel’s pedalling back to his hotel, the road’s blocked with cars, buses and civilians. Yes, it’s the finish of the 32 kilometre mountain time trial – trouble is that we want to be at the start and the satnav is routing us through the finish area.

But the cops and race officials are tame and they guide us through to the ‘off course’ route to Embrun – that’s the one the team cars and motorcycle police use to get back to the start in place to place chronos.

The moto gendarmes are amazing, guiding their little convoy of team cars through the traffic at high speed, often one handed as they give bold and unambiguous hand signals to other road users and exuding supreme confidence on a motor bike – very impressive to watch.

You only think you can handle a bike until you follow someone like David Millar in a technical time trial – your eyes jar open as you watch him hurtling into tight bends on wet pavements like there’s no tomorrow.

And talking of wet pavements, there was an apocalyptic shower on the second climb of the day – I don’t think I’ve ever witnessed rain like it outside of the Gulf Coast in the USA.

On the subject of Canyon, their TT machine is visually the ‘cleanest’ of them all – and whilst I know what looks right isn’t always right when you get it in a wind tunnel, aesthetically it’s a lovely, mean machine.

But it wasn’t a day for time trial bikes, as we soon discovered as soon as our boy Arthur left the start house.

It’s always organised chaos at the start, but somehow you end up where you’re meant to be, the countdown starts and you’re away.

It was a great course to see and exciting to follow Vichot, but from a pictures point of view, it wasn’t the best, the climb was narrow plus there were two team cars behind him who really weren’t interested in us getting views of their rider.

Its best with one team car and a ViP car or commissaire, you can usually gesture to them that you want to come up and take pics – and most of the time they’ll play ball.

But not today – so apologies if we’re not as close as we might have been.

Ed and Martin, our top team! They try to do the local Time Trials, the Grand Tours and the Classics together to get the great stories written, the quality photos taken, the driving done and the wifi wrestled with.

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Germany, somewhere near the Taunus mountains at 09:22 Sunday. We left the Zürich Six Day at 03:00 and there are still 400 kilometres to go to the ferry at Amsterdam. It began to snow like Hell about an hour into Germany; there were roadworks, we were diverted off the motorway and there were either no diversion signs or they were snowbound. Whichever it was, we ended up hideously lost and dropped a chunk of time.

The British Road Race Championships 2010 on the 27th June was a race of attrition, but the riders started leaving via the back door very early in the race, due to the severity of the the seven-mile circuit around the Lancashire town of Barley, which was pretty much either up or down all day.

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Here at VeloVeritas, we provide our readers with truthful, accurate, unique and informative articles about the sport we love. We attend many local races as well as work on the professional circuit, from the local "10" mile time trial to the "monuments" - classics like Milan-SanRemo and the Tour of Lombardy, the World Road and Track Championships, the winter Six Days and the Grand Tours; le Tour de France, il Giro d'Italia and la Vuelta a España.